Painless Solution to Apple Mail to Outlook 2011 Import

For this week’s post, I will address the question asked by one of my long time readers via email about Apple Mail to Outlook 2011 import.

It seems most of the Mac users are either on Apple Mail or on Outlook 2011 email client. Thunderbird, Postbox, and Entourage may have some user base, but mostly these two clients have dominated the present-day when it comes to email clients for desktop.

And it also seems that many users switch back and forth from Apple Mail to Outlook 2011 for different reasons. Sometimes it is the necessity from office, or sometimes it is personal reasons, and sometimes other obligations. Whatever that is, users frequently switch their email clients, during which they also had to deal with moving their data.

Apple Mail to Outlook 2011 Import

This transfer of data is often very disruptive to their work, and can be very frustrating. Most of the solutions that are suggested on internet are very troublesome and do not offer the easy, streamlined experience of data transfer.

For this article, I will stick to just one sided transfer, that is from Apple Mail to Outlook 2011 import. In other words, transferring/moving/migrating emails from Apple Mail to Outlook 2011 for Mac.

Along these same lines, the question asked my fellow friend and the reader was –

I want to move to Outlook 2011 after years of use of Apple Mail. But the data stored in Apple Mail is not in my hotmail.com server. It is stored in offline databases, so syncing the account on Outlook 2011 won’t help. How can I perform this apple mail to Outlook 2011 import? I need a quick and a painless solution that won’t had me stuck in it for hours, only to end up with distorted emails, and corrupted folders. Is there any? Please let me know.

And my answer is simple – “Mail Extractor Max”.

What this tool does is take your Apple Mail database (or Mbox files, coming to this in next paragraph), and convert all of it to Olm files, where Olm files can be imported to Outlook 2011.

There are two options for the tool to take the data – either directly through the database of Apple Mail that is installed in “Mail” folder on your Mac. 2- Or through manually selecting Mbox files stored anywhere in your Mac.

The first option is ridiculously simple and quick. Simply choose “Auto-load” in ‘Mail Extractor Max’ and it will do the rest. If you don’t have Apple Mail installed, or your data is somewhere else stored in Mbox file, choose to manually load Mbox file.

If you have don’t have an Mbox file and Apple Mail is installed in other computer, such as office system, and you are performing this conversion in your own personal computer – what you need to do is export the data into Mbox file using Apple Mail’s import/export feature.

Here’s what you need to do –

On the computer where Apple Mail is installed, select the mailbox/es, then choose ‘Mailbox>export mailbox’. Choose a folder, or create a new folder, then click choose. All the contents from your mailbox will be exported to .mbox format.

Now you have to copy this .mbox file from the location where you saved it into your personal Mac (the one where you are using Outlook 2011). Simply load this mbox file into “mail Extractor Max”, choose the folders you want to convert, choose the output format as “Outlook Mac 2011” and click “convert”.

This will generate RGE file for you, that you can import to Outlook 2011/2016/2019 for Mac.

Lo and behold! Go to your Outlook 2011 and import it. You will see all the emails and folders on your Outlook 2011, with every single item of data exactly as it was in Apple Mail. No distorted folders, no corrupted items, no change of folder hierarchy, no broken images, and no loss of non-English characters.

This quality of preserving the content with such precision is what I find the best about “Mail Extractor Max”.

Related Article: Apple Mail to Entourage 2008

I hope I have answered the question satisfactorily.

Use “Mail Extractor Max” without any hesitation. You can download the free version here.